


Explorations in an Alternate Universe

by Animunculi



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: Alternate Universe - Firefly Setting, Alternate Universe - Mass Effect Setting, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-17
Updated: 2017-06-06
Packaged: 2018-11-01 16:01:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10925220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Animunculi/pseuds/Animunculi
Summary: Various Dragon Age AU's of unregulated length and quality.





	1. One of Those Days (Superhero AU)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lyrium Ghost wonders if having “one of those days” everyday meant he was having “one of those lives”. It was something to ponder, at least, while one took down the criminal underbelly of the City of Chains. Superhero AU.

Spending an evening in a stakeout van was hardly Ghost’s idea of entertainment, but there was some satisfaction to be garnered by spying on a gang of Carta-turned-slavers. Next to him, the Captain of the Kirkwall Guard sipped her coffee from an office chair she’d dragged into the van. Aveline was tolerable company; she knew better than to bother with small talk, unlike some of her younger officers.

Everything had been going according to plan, because that was something both Aveline and Ghost excelled at, until the Champion’s smug grin appeared on their monitor. 

Ghost wished he could say this was unusual.

After pulling a few silly faces, the man disappeared until, through the cameras in the motel room, the stunned police watched the vigilante crawl in through an open window with Siren’s Call just behind him.

“Oh sod it,” Aveline groaned into her coffee.

A blue burst of light and a blast of magic from an unseen mage shattered the lens.

Aveline wasted no time leaping to her feet, throwing her chair to the side as she barreled through uniformed officers in an effort to reach the van’s double doors.

“Move, move!” Aveline pushed at Ghost’s shoulder, losing her stalwart professionalism in her flurry. “Get your arse in gear!”

Ghost merely grumbled, knowing she held irrational fondness for the Champion (if exasperation counted as a facet of fondness) and the man’s mage associates. He considered her a reasonable women concerning anything else, but Aveline was often irritably obstinate whenever Ghost closed in on the known apostates Dalish Pariah or Justice.

But it was hard to hate her when she kicked her way through the scrawny motel door, even when Ghost pointed out that it wasn’t locked, and shed Ghost’s latent blue glow on the oddest scene either of them had ever come across.

The Dalish Pariah was standing on the bed, bouncing slightly in excitement as she held down three assailants with the vines that grew from the bloody slashes in her wrists, while the Champion sat on the Carta leader, laughing at Justice and Siren.

The abomination was suspended by his ankle, the victim of one of the Carta’s traps, with his stupid, feathery coat hanging over his face while Siren stood atop a table and worked at the cuff suspending him from the ceiling.

At least Justice was no longer glowing.

“How come we always meet like this?” Champion called. “Me, dashingly handsome. And you, upside down with a woman’s face in your crotch.”

“Funny,” Justice grumbled in his striking Ferelden lilt, clearly embarrassed but disguising his tone with his customary sarcasm as effectively as his blush was hidden by his mask. That is, ineffectively. “At least shove something up my arse too. Complete the picture.”

“The night is young,” Siren chuckled, pressed unnecessarily close to Justice as she finally released the trap and sent the abomination sprawling on the floor, smashing into an unfortunate Carta member beneath him.

Pariah giggled cutely, withdrawing the vines into her skin with a slick _swish_.

Oddly enough, it was the perpetually dazed blood mage who noticed the Guard-Captain of Kirkwall and the Lyrium Ghost standing shocked in the doorway.

“Oh!” Pariah cooed, her leafy, swirling mask disguising everything but the beaming smile that flitted across her face. “Captain! Ghost! Hello!”

Ghost crossed his arms just as Aveline brought her hand to message the bridge of her nose, disapproval emanating from the doorway. Even the Carta members looked a little cowed, although two were unconscious, one was recovering from Justice’s fall, and the leader was still suffering the combined weight of the Champion and Siren, once she tumbled onto his lap.

Champion grinned widely. “Aveline! Fancy seeing you here.”

Aveline glared and the Champion at least had the self-awareness to look bashful.

The hero lounged over the dwarf with smirk that was two parts insufferably smug and one part guilty. “We totally caught your bad guys.”

Ghost wished, with all his being, that he wasn’t the last bastion of sanity in Kirkwall.


	2. Renegades and Paragons (Mass Effect AU)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When hunting down an errant Commander Hawke, Cassandra comes across a motley gang of characters. Mass Effect AU.

“Tell me,” Cassandra hissed, pressing her hands against the table and flashing her eyes in a way that she must have thought was intimidating, “about Commander Hawke.”

The former C-Spec merely quirked an eyebrow as she leaned forward and, with little preamble and even less interest, said, “I’ve been trying to arrest Hawke for years. That idiot drives like a menace to society.”

The red-haired human refused to say anything else and Cassandra gave up after a few more questions. The Spectre was never rough or impolite; she and this woman were kindred spirits, after all, and Cassandra was always looking for new disgusted noises to add to her repertoire.

* * *

Cassandra was regretting not getting more out of the C-Spec once she interviewed the pirate. She hadn’t counted on there being only one sane person in Hawke’s crew.

When asked (and occasionally without prompting), the Asari leaned forward to display her impressive cleavage and purred, “What do you want to about the Commander? Oh,” she gasped, faux surprise drifting across her face, “you mean the sex, don’t you? Well, beautiful, that was fantastic.”

The pirate placed her chin against her open palm and leered. “Just like everything else I put my hands on.”

In the five minutes it took Cassandra to compose herself and begin a second interview, hopefully with Leliana’s pretty face strategically placed as a distraction, the pirate had already given the guard a handjob, stolen his keys, the guard’s wallet, _Cullen’s_ wallet, and commandeered a ship.

Cassandra also hadn’t counted on her being _that_ good.

* * *

The next prisoner got lost on her way to the interrogation room which was doubly impressive because she was handcuffed and being led by Cullen Rutherford. The poor man had about ten minutes of full-blown panic, something Cassandra may have inadvertently exacerbated by yelling at him, until one of his Cerberus mercenaries found the little Quarian cooing over a potted flower.

She apologized for getting lost, repeatedly, and Cullen was doubly embarrassed over losing a woman who wasn’t trying to escape.

“Hawke?” the little creature repeated, just as mystified with Cassandra as Cassandra was with her willful obliviousness. When she hummed in thought and tilted her head cutely, her entire apparatus shifted worryingly to the side. “Oh yes! Hawke’s good at everything! Well,” she paused, pressing a finger against the screen, “except maybe dancing.”

* * *

Their next prisoner was an incredibly nervous, stammering biotic.

“H-Hawke?” she stuttered. “Hawke who? I’ve never even heard of Hawke, that’s a bird, right? My name’s Bethany Amell, who told you my name was Hawke?”

Unfortunately, the forthcoming biotic disappeared just after their interview.

* * *

The next prisoner didn’t even wait until Cassandra asked a question before slamming his fist into the table and shouting, “Why does everyone want to talk about my family all the bleeding time?!”

The young man disappeared as well, although he spent noticeably more time in the Citadel then Bethany Amell did. Something he whined about to anyone who stood still long enough.

* * *

Cassandra was reasonably suspicious when her next prisoner had long blond hair and a black mustache.

She was pretty sure it was glued on.

When asked about Hawke, the biotic merely snorted. “Madame Lusine probably knows more about the Commander then me.”

Suddenly, a rather shocking series of realizations struck Cassandra all at once and she gasped. “Aren’t you the biotic who blew up the Kirkwall Chantry?!”

“What!?” The biotic gawked, hand on his chest with all the false drama of a man who never learned how to act. His moustache wobbled dangerously. “Of course not! That guy didn’t have such luxurious facial hair.”

Cassandra twisted around to tell Leliana they caught the rebel leader on accident and to bring in more suitable handcuffs, only to find nothing but a spinning office chair when she turned back.

“Dammit!” Cullen cursed once he arrived. “How does he _always do that?!_ ”

* * *

By the time Cassandra dragged her next prisoner into the interrogation room, she was feeling distinctly ungenerous.

The prisoner, apparently, was feeling the same way.

“Were you curious,” the Drell snapped, unprompted and uninterested as he examined the lines of eezo embedded into his flesh, “the biotic you just interrogated blew up the Chantry.”

Cassandra groaned. “I know. He escaped.”

When the alien merely shot her a disappointed scowl, as if expecting better of her, Cassandra could only bring herself to point at the open door and invite the man to do the same.

* * *

By the time the last prisoner slumped down into the office chair, grinning and intertwining his fingers as if he were the one with all the questions, Cassandra was drafting her letter of resignation. 

“Don’t listen to any of those idiots. Let _me_ tell you about the Commander-”

“Just… get out.”


	3. A Light in Space (Firefly AU)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And he called it the Ostagar. Firefly AU.

The key to selling stolen merchandise, Isabela was once fond of quipping, was finding a wannabe captain dumb or desperate enough to buy a third-generation freighter actively in the process of coming apart.

She found that idiot in Garrett Hawke.

It wasn’t a good ship; it could be, theoretically, but it wasn’t. The engine had been gutted down to its composite parts; that it had managed to hobble its way from Amaranthine to Kirkwall was a miracle on its own. Not even mentioning the fact that it had somehow outpaced the Darkspawn raiders.

The bridge was intact, technically. The chairs had been stolen long before Isabela had even gotten her hands on the ship, along with everything else that wasn’t nailed down or welded to the consul. And some things that were.

The missile bay was intact, again, technically. Isabela wasn’t even going to lie about the state of the kitchen and the various empty rooms that were once serviceable cabins and a cargo hold. The only thing left in what Isabela assumed must have been the med bay was a chair with suspicious stirrups.

Might have been a med bay, might have been a sex dungeon. Regardless, Isabela was keeping that tidbit to herself.

Particularly from Garrett Hawke’s companion, a sly, witty, devastatingly attractive dwarf called Varric Tethras, who was determined to remain remarkably unimpressed about most of Isabela’s collection. She would have to be wary of that one, but, by the blessings of luck, it seemed like Garrett was dumb enough to compensate for his good taste in friends.

“ _So_ ,” she purred, laying a hand on her perspective buyer’s shoulder, purposely ignoring the roll of the dwarf’s eyes. “What do you think?”

“Yeah,” Hawke said after a long moment of gazing at the ship with the glint in his eye that filled Varric with a singular dread. “That’s the one.”

He called it the Ostagar, the origin of the name being a story for another time, and the story of how Isabela was shanghaied into piloting the ship was even more unbelievable. All painstakingly chronicled in Tales of the Champion, written by one Varric Tethras.

Available where ever literary works of art are sold.


	4. Romance in Space (Sci-Fi AU)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes it's best to let sleeping dogs lie. Generic Sci-Fi AU.

In the midst of a _platonic discussion_ between Hawke and Isabela in the empty bridge, a shrill distress call sounded over the intercom, the one that Aveline had asked them to stop using for nonessential communication and that they continued to use mostly to irritate her. "Hawke! Your freaky alien beast won't get out of my blighted med bay!"

"It's a Mabari, Anders," Hawke responded into the speaker, leaning forward to address the microphone without looking away from the schematic of the Gallows station. It actually had been a platonic discussion about breaking into secure fortresses and Isabela's other interests and Hawke was beginning to get a bit annoyed with his favorite dwarf's chosen phrasing.

He tried to be sympathetic to his entire crew, including overly nosy dwarves and half-mad doctors with voices in their heads, but he had actual work to complete, thank you very much.

“He wasn't talking about Dog,” Isabela snickered, tapping Hawke’s shoulder to draw his attention to the screen behind him, a rotating video of the med bay where Fenris and Anders stood, shouting in each other's faces and mere moments away from pulling hair.

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Hawke complained for not even for the third time that day.

He would have left those dysfunctional idiots to their devices, half hoping they just killed each other to make this voyage incrementally more bearable, except Varric’s voice rang out from the same intercom with the hint of a desperate plea.

“If anyone wants to watch two emotional cripples flirt,” his signature, sarcastic drawl sounded twice as irritated over the intercom's static, “our resident combat medic-slash-hopelessly romantic renegade and broody guard-slash-scourge of the Tevinter slavers are putting on a good show down in Medical. Please come and save me.”

Hawke glanced back at the screen, showing a slowly rotating view of the med bay, and watched in horror as the camera panned right and Anders and Fenris disappeared to reveal one very annoyed Varric, laid up with a broken leg in one of the beds. 

“Oh shit,” Isabela noted. “Better go save that handsome son of a bitch, he does all our banking.”

Hawke and Isabela, deserving medals as the most loyal of friends, were on their feet before Fenris could rip out Varric’s heart for _the vile, disgusting insinuation that he would ever sleep with an abomination!_

Once in the med bay, Hawke belatedly realized that he had never actually seen Fenris eat; his immediate assumption was that the elf sustained himself by annoying Anders. As if Anders' teeth grinding was his species' nutrition. Actually, now that he was on that line of thought, Merrill also seemed to annoy Anders a suspicious amount.

“Imagine them having sex,” Isabela whispered gleefully as they lingered in the doorway. “They’d glow like an irradiated engine core.”

“Make him get out of my med bay!” Anders shrieked, flailing his hands around his ears. Their doctor was actually quite a specimen of human masculinity, but anyone would sound shrill when shouting over Fenris’ growling baritone. “I can't work like this!”

Hawke eyed Fenris, leaning casually against the wall with a conflicted look; a cross between a smug smirk, as if having Anders ready to tear out his own hair was a pleasurable outcome, and a furrowed glare, as though it still wasn't quite the preferred outcome.

One day, Hawke knew they would both snap and have sex and their problems would only increase. He was preparing for that day with copious amounts of alcohol hidden under his bed and daily mediation.

He shot Isabela a glance, wondering if they should set the two up if only to speed up the inevitable, and received a shrug in response; they had come to an agreement to stop meddling in their friend's lives, at least after the last disaster.

Last year, in an effort to halt the approaching calamity that was Fenris and Anders working through their issues through sex, Isabela had taken it upon herself to seduce Fenris while Hawke had flirted endlessly with Anders. The only thing that plan netted them was an insufferably satisfied Fenris and an Anders with a hopeless crush on Hawke.

If anything, their schemes only made everything worse, as Varric was often eager to point out and as far as Hawke was concerned, Isabela was the only one who came out a winner. Probably because she cheated.

"Hawke told me to come down here," Fenris lied, crossing his arms and tilting his chin up at Anders, who seethed.

"Maker." Hawke rubbed the bridge of his nose, eyes shut tight against the cosmic horror that was being Captain of a ship full of lunatics. "I asked you to patrol the second deck, Fenris, not go… rouge."

Fenris looked betrayed and Anders looked vindicated. Pleased with his victory, the doctor turned and crossed the room to deal with a suspiciously blinking light on the anti-bacterial dispenser while Fenris shuffled irritably towards the door, defeat etched into his scowl. Hawke felt like he'd defused the first in a series of bombs and was left staring hopelessly at the rest of them.

"Sweet mother of every sod in the Void," Varric groaned from his cot as the elf passed him. "Why don't you just pull his hair, Broody? That'll make him notice you."

To combined horror of his friends, Fenris seemed to consider this.

**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr at almsiviintervention


End file.
